


At the Moth

by spiderfire



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Moth Storyslam, carnegie hero medal
Genre: Child Death, Gen, Hydra (Marvel), Lost Memories, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), POV Female Character, POV Original Character, POV Outsider, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-05
Updated: 2015-10-05
Packaged: 2018-04-21 07:40:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4820900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiderfire/pseuds/spiderfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The event was advertised as "True stories, told live" with a theme of "Encounters that are not what they seem".  The thing about live storytelling is that sometimes the storyteller flops, and sometimes they are great and sometimes the story connects in ways you do not expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At the Moth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smaragdbird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smaragdbird/gifts).



The applause died down and the MC walked back out onto the stage. “I am pleased to introduce our third storyteller with another tale of encounters that are not what they seem. Everyone, please welcome Stephanie Schmidt. She is speaking on the Moth stage for the first time!”

The MC stepped back from the mike as the next storyteller stepped out from behind the curtain. The last speaker had been in his thirties and although he had been nervous, he had hid it well. This woman was easily twice his age and she wore her nerves plainly. Once she stepped out from behind the curtain and into the light, she froze. The MC walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. He spoke to her quietly as they walked to the center of the stage. With a glance at the MC, she stepped up to the microphone and gripped it, stilling her shaking hands. 

Steve, who was sitting in the back of the darkened theater with Bucky, leaned over and said, “How are you doing?” 

Bucky shrugged, squeezing Steve’s hand. “The stories are interesting. They echo. In here,” he tapped his chest. “You know what I mean?” 

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Gabe could spin a good one.” 

“The colonel though. Remember…”

“Yeah,” Steve interrupted.

The woman was older, with grey, curly hair and a generously round figure. Her hair was held back in a fluffy ponytail that brushed her neck. She was wearing black jeans and a purple t-shirt with a picture of Einstein on it. A simple silver ring on her left hand glinted in the stage light. She wore no make up, no other jewelry and her shoes were the utmost in utilitarian design: simple black suede loafers. 

She stared out at the audience for a moment as the applause died down and she started speaking. “I am a science teacher. For the last 20 years, I have taught physics to the juniors and seniors at Central High School.” 

There were whistles and shouts from the back corner, “Go Tigers!” and “Use the force, Dr. Schmidt!” 

The woman froze and then glanced at the MC who was offstage. She nodded in his direction, adjusted her grip on the microphone and faced the center of the audience. When she spoke her voice was clear and it did not shake. “I stand up in front of an audience every day. I tell my students stories all the time. I have no idea why I am so nervous. I have even told this story, well part of it, dozens of times in a discussion about conservation laws. But, well, you’ll see.” 

The woman took a deep breath. As she was collecting herself, Steve whispered to Bucky, “I used to hate this moment when the audience was hushed, before I knew if the show was going to flop or be a success.” 

Bucky did not reply. His eyes were glued on the woman. 

“About thirty years ago, I was a young mother. My eldest was a toddler and I was pregnant with my second. My first pregnancy had been difficult. I had terrible morning sickness and I was on bed rest for months. By comparison, my second pregnancy was a breeze. I had heard that boys are harder to carry than girls, so maybe that was it, or maybe my body had figured out this baby-making thing and it was chugging along on auto-pilot.” 

“I was in my second trimester and I felt such a sense of relief, such a sense of freedom. The doctor encouraged me to walk and walk I did. Every afternoon, I put my son in the stroller and we walked and walked for miles.” 

“My son was at that age where he resisted naps. He was so sure he was going to miss something and it took every trick in my book to get him to sleep. Anyway, after an hour or so of walking, he had finally gone to sleep. I stopped at a bench for a rest when, out of nowhere, a car came careening down the road. It must have been going nearly eighty miles per hour. It was one of those black SUVs. You know the kind that SWAT teams and drug dealers drive on TV? There was a squeal of brakes and then, I think, the loudest noise I have ever heard as it crashed headlong into a tree not ten feet from the bench I was sitting on. The car literally wrapped itself around the tree, bending into the shape of a ‘u’. Then the most surreal thing happened. The tree cracked in the collision and the crown toppled on the car’s roof, but the way it fell over it seemed so slow, barely moving at first and then gathering speed. I am a physicist. I can write the exact equations that describe the way it fell, but that does not change the fact that it was like living in a slow-motion movie, watching it go.” 

The same voice who had urged Dr. Schmidt to ‘use the force’, earlier, shouted, “The force that the car exerts on the tree is equal in magnitude, opposite in direction, to the force the tree exerts on the car.” Stephanie Schmidt smiled thinly at the heckler and went on.

“In retrospect, this is one of those moments in my life where I made a decision, a split second decision, a decision I did not consider or weigh or think through, and I will spend the rest of my life wondering about that decision. I believe that moments like these are the moments that reveal one’s true character. You see, when the crash happened, I forgot I was a mother. I forgot about my son. I even forgot that I was pregnant. I am sure I jumped. I probably screamed, but what changed everything was what I could see of the crash.” 

“There were two men in the car. Both were slumped forward and unmoving. Gasoline was running from the car.” 

“What should I have done? Should I have taken my son and run for it? Probably. But I didn’t.” 

“In that moment, I did something that has made me wonder, every single day, what kind of a person I am. I didn’t look at my son. I just ran. I didn’t run away from the car. I ran towards it. I remember screaming. I remember the smell of gas. I remember grabbing the handle of the door and pulling. I remember the handle tearing off the door in my grasp. I remember shards of glass everywhere. I remember leaning into the window. The man on the passenger side of the car was so young, barely older than my students. I shook his shoulder. He did not respond. I remember reaching across his body and releasing the seatbelt. I remembered pulling the latch to opened the door from the inside.” 

“I nearly fell backwards off the running boards as the door released, but I was able to grab the man – he was wearing some sort of leather vest that seemed to have lots of pockets and straps – and we fell together backwards and out of the car. Somehow, I dragged him away. There was blood everywhere.” 

“I don’t know where they came from, but there were other people who took him from me as I struggled to drag him . I remember noticing that everyone was dressed in black and how that seemed odd, but there was no time to think about it. I realized that the other man, the driver, was still in the car. I went back.” 

The room was silent. Bucky reached over and squeezed Steve’s hand again. Steve looked at him curiously, but Bucky’s eyes were riveted on the woman telling the story. 

“The driver was slumped over the wheel when I got there. His hair hung in his face and blood oozed from a gash on his check. I touched his arm and it was cold. And hard.” Stephanie released the microphone as she said this and she held the hand in front of her face, reaching out as if to touch someone. She paused for a long breath, holding her arm out, looking at it in wonder. “Now, isn’t that the strangest thing to remember? Of all the things that were happening at that moment, what I remember, what I still remember, is the coldness on my hand.” 

Speaking more quickly, she dropped her arm and went on. “Then I saw his hair move and flutter with his breath. I was starting to reach across him when his head came up and his hand closed around my wrist and he looked at me with wild eyes. I screamed. And here is the craziest part of all. The hand was made of metal. It was not strong _like_ it was made of metal. It was actual metal. Silver and shiny and completely impossible.” 

In the back, Steve whispered, “Bucky?” But Bucky did not reply. The woman on stage continued. “The next part went so fast. He literally threw me over his shoulder and ran. We made it maybe a half dozen strides before the blast of the car hit us and we were thrown through the air.” 

Steve whispered again, “Bucky?” but he got no reply. 

Again, she was silent. The face of Einstein on her shirt grinned out at the audience while she stood stock still, a statue in a puddle of light on the stage. The silence stretched on until she broke it. “I woke up in a hospital,” she said, speaking in a measured cadence very different than the quick staccato she had been using a moment before. “My arm was broken, I had a concussion, but my baby was okay. I could feel her moving. I rubbed my belly with my good arm and felt the spot where my daughter was kicking. I remembered doing the same thing when I was pregnant with my son. My son? I looked around the hospital room. There were beeping monitors. There was a vase of flowers. There were those ridiculous curtains. There was no son. I pressed the call button again and again and again until a nurse came and I asked her, ‘What about my son?’ She looked back at me and shook her head. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said.” 

“Things got worse, after that. My husband came to see me and I told him the story. He was so angry with me because I had not protected his son. Who could blame him? Then the police came to see me and I told them the story, but they said that there had been no car crash, there had been no man with metal arms. There had been a gas build up in the sewer. In the sewers! My husband came back and accused me of lying to get attention. He showed me the story in the paper. I told him to go away and he did.” 

“For years, no one believed me. I hardly believed it myself. Sometimes I wondered, had I really even had a son? My husband left me. My daughter grew up to be an English major. It took me eleven years to finish my PhD.” 

“And then came insane battle on that DC highway between Captain America and a man with a metal arm. The news was too weird for words. I streamed it live into my AP Physics class and we watched in stunned silence. I could not believe it my eyes. The man with the metal arm was real.” 

Steve leaned over and whispered, “Bucky?”

Bucky did not reply. His jaw was set, his eyes were glued to Stephanie Schmidt. His fingers were clenched around the armrest of his seat.

“Two days later was the SHIELD data drop.” 

“As my students in the audience know, I love data. I love graphs. I love playing with data and looking for patterns. That massive release after what we had just seen was too tempting. I did what any self respecting data wonk would do. I called in sick and dove into that mess before it disappeared. It was by accident when I was looking at geographic data of Hydra’s missions that I stumbled upon the document that gave me whole other areas of research.” 

“It described a training mission where the agent known as the Winter Soldier was working with a young recruit by the name of Brock Rumlow. The actual mission was redacted from the document I found, but it described the car crash and the clean up afterwards. It even mentioned me and my son, not by name, but what had happened to us.” 

“I sat there, staring at the screen and the tears poured down my face. I was not crazy. For thirty years, I had questioned my memory. Every effort I had made to look into what had happened just confirmed the gas leak story. I even came to believe it myself. Finally, there was proof that this had actually happened.” 

“I read everything I could find on the Winter Soldier and Brock Rumlow.” She paused and gripped the microphone again and stared out into the lights. When she spoke again, her voice was impassive and hard. “The files that were released were incomplete. I don’t know if it was by design or if the NSA choked them off, but based on what I could find, let me tell you about the kind of men I saved that day. Let me tell you about the kind of men my son died for.” 

“The Winter Soldier was an assassin. Before the data dump, the CIA credited him with some two dozen kills starting in during the Cold War and going into the present. How one man could be active over sixty years, I have no idea. He certainly did not seem much older than thirty when I met him and the man we saw on the freeway was the spitting image of the man in my memory. Over those thirty years, my hair had gone grey but he didn’t even get a haircut. And that was not the only mystery. The data dump showed that the CIA had woefully underestimated his kills, which number in the hundreds. In the last thirty years since I saved him, he has killed nearly fifty people, including ten children.” 

“Brock Rumlow, on the other hand, went on to become both a decorated SHIELD agent and a decorated Hydra agent. He made a career of lying to the men who should be our heroes, of stabbing in the back the men who should be our protectors.” 

She was silent for a moment and a bell chimed in the silence that marked her thirty second warning. She let go of the mike and wiped her hands on her pants legs before she continued. 

“On that summer day, when I ran forward to save those two men in the car, I was just thinking that they need help. They were someone’s father, someone’s son, someone’s husband or someone’s friend. If it was my daughter in that car, I’d hope that someone would help her. But now I know just who I risked my life for, who I risked my daughter’s life for, who my son died for and it haunts me every day. Tell me, what kind of a person does that make me? Am I a good woman? A good mother? Am I even a good Samaritan? The world would have been a better place if they both had just died that day. Yet, I saved them.” She looked straight out into the audience and blinked in the bright lights. Her final words were barely over a whisper. “I saved them.” She shook her head and stepped back from the microphone. The bell chimed again, announcing that she was out of time. She stood there for a beat longer before she turned and walked off stage. 

The audience was silent, not knowing how to react until she was halfway off. And then the clapping started. At first it was just one person and then others joined them. 

In the back, Bucky, who was not clapping, said, “I’ve got to get some air.” He got up and Steve followed him. 

It took a moment for the MC to come back on stage. “Uh,” he said. “Thank you Stephanie. Next up, we have Josh McNight with another story of an unexpected encounter…” 

The door to the theater closed behind Steve and Bucky. They stood alone in the foyer. Steve looked at Bucky, who had his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, his shoulders hunched. “Are you...Did that…” he began. 

Bucky looked up at Steve and he nodded. “Sort of,” he said. 

“Oh, god.” 

“Brock was driving.” 

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I didn’t recognize that woman when she got up. She was young and slim and had a mane of black hair then. I remember the blast, shielding her, but then they took her off in an ambulance and I went back to the lab. I didn’t know about the boy.” 

Steve put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder and squeezed it. Bucky looked at the ground and traced a tile line with the toe of his boot. “Rumlow was just a trainee then. It was supposed to be a recon mission. Safe. Simple.” He shook his head. “Didn’t work out that way.”

“Does it ever?” Steve asked. 

Bucky smiled faintly, looking up at Steve. “He was an overconfident punk. Kind of like someone else I once knew.” Steve’s eyes widened. Looking back down, Bucky continued, “He pushed all the right buttons in me.” 

Steve squeezed Bucky’s shoulder again. “Always the sarge, huh? Looking out for your guys?” 

“That’s one way to put it.” 

“It’s not your fault...” 

Bucky pulled away from Steve. “I wish you would stop saying that,” he said, raising his voice. Then, suddenly hearing the way his words echoed in the empty lobby he dropped the volume again. “This was not an assassination. This was an accident and it was my fault. Brock was my responsibility. That he fubared the mission was my responsibility. That a civilian was put in harm’s way, well, that is a consequence of the other two things.” He shook his head, turning away. 

“Okay, okay,” said Steve.

Bucky turned back. “Sorry,” he said. “I should not have…” 

“It’s nothing,” said Steve. “Shall we get out of here?” 

Bucky shook his head. “Not yet.” 

“What are we waiting for?”

Bucky looked at Steve, meeting his eyes. 

“You want to meet her?” Steve guessed. 

Bucky nodded. 

“You sure that is a good idea?” 

Bucky shook his head. “No, but I want to anyway.”

Steve looked at Bucky, studying him and then he needed in agreement. “Okay,” he said.

They sat in the lobby, side by side, talking about the worn gilt painting on the ceiling and what it must have looked like back in the thirties. Then the doors opened and people started to pour out, chatting and laughing in small clumps. The speakers came out last. Stephanie Schmidt had a small group of teenagers around her and they were talking about a football game. Bucky stood and Steve stood a moment later. 

Her eyes slid over them without seeing, but then Bucky took a step forward. “Dr. Schmidt?” 

She paused. “Yes?” She was looking at him, now, but without recognition. 

Bucky looked at her and pressed his lips into a nervous smile. “I just wanted to tell you. I am sorry for your loss.” 

She blinked, surprised. “Oh! Uh. Thank you,” she said awkwardly. “Uh. It was a long time ago.” 

Bucky nodded. “I know,” he said. Bucky glanced at Steve and Steve gestured at the door. Bucky nodded. "Anyway, uh, take care," he said and the two of them walked off. 

One of the students next to Stephanie Schmidt said, “So, Dr. Schmidt. Are you coming to the game on Sunday?” 

But she was not paying attention. She was staring at the door where the two men had disappeared. 

Another one of the students frowned, following her glance and said, “Hey, wait. Was that Captain America?”

“Naw,” someone said. “Captain America is blonde.” 

“It can’t be,” Stephanie Schmidt said.

“No,” another student replied. “The one behind.” 

“I didn’t notice.” 

“What’d you say Dr. Schmidt?”

“Weird. Let’s go?” interrupted another. 

The students started to walk off but Stephanie Schmidt did not move. One of them turned around. “Dr. Schmidt. You okay?”

“Hey, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!" another student said. 

Stephanie Schmidt shook herself and then refocused on the student with some effort. “I’m fine,” she said after a moment. “Let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt mentioned an outsider POV, which I love to do, but the outsider wound up being SO outside in this one, you could not really see the relationships. :/ 
> 
> [Moth Storyslams](http://themoth.org/) are real events. 
> 
> This story was inspired by the [Carnegie Hero Medals.](http://www.carnegiehero.org/)


End file.
